I just built my first computer. It consist of a Cooler Master 932 HAF advanced case, an ASUS M4A87TD EVO motherboard, W/D 1 TBYTE hard drive, AMD Phenom II processor, 700W Coolmax PSU, Crucial 64GB SSD, 16GB's RAM, PNY Quadro 400 Graphics Video Card, Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium O/S. I have the computer up and running, I have the O/S installed and working fine. Now I find out from Verizon that I need a network interface card to get my high speed internet connection. Can anyone suggest what manufacturer and possibly a product number for a NIC card that I should purchase? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
My reference says your mother board has a pair of PCI Express slots.
Any Network Inferface card that you can plug into your mother board (PCI Express or PCI-e) that is available with a Windows 7/64 bit driver should work just fine. The problem is a lot of older NIC's don't have Windows 7 drivers available. So the short answer is that as long as it is a PCI Express card, and has Windows 7/64 drivers available, there should be no issues.
Gigabit Ethernet will be more than fast enough, since few Verizon routers currently support anything faster than 100mbps.
You don't need to go buy an NIC. Your ASUS Motherboard already has a Realtek Gigabit NIC integrated into it. On the back of the motherboard where your USB ports are you'll see what seems to be an oversized phone jack. That is your NIC. Plug the Ethernet cable into there and your PC should get access to the Internet right off the bat. The NIC will indicate link by lighting up and a second light will indicate data transfer. The drivers for most of the Integrated Realtek NICs are included in Windows so they should be installed already if you haven't done the honors.
As smith6612 said, you should already have a NIC integrated into the motherboard. Check in Device Manager under Network Adapters to see if it's installed correctly. If it has a yellow exclamation mark it's either needs the drivers installed or the integrated NIC is faulty. If it's faulty you can buy just about any NIC in any store to use. I think every NIC made in the last 10 years is rated to run at least the full speed of your internet connection. If you want to get one with a solid reputation Intel and Netgear brands come to mind.
Just as a heads up if the Integrated NIC fails to be recognized even if enabled in the BIOS and it lights up when you connect a cable to it: Reset your CMOS by killing all power going to the PC, and removing the battery on the motherboard. Don't do this if you are running a RAID array on your PC. Once that is done you will need to reconfigure anything you've set in the BIOS, but the NIC should come alive the next time Windows boots and starts to work. I've seen a few motherboard recently with buggy firmware that caused the on-board NIC to get messed up like that.
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